> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.tireshopiq.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Winning Fleet and Commercial Accounts - URL: https://www.tireshopiq.com/winning-fleet-and-commercial-accounts/ - Published: 2026-09-15T22:27:48.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T22:27:48.000Z - Author: Staff Writer - Tags: Fill The Bays Retail customers are unpredictable. Some weeks they show up in waves, some weeks they don't show up at all, and there's not much you can do about the weather, the economy, or whether someone's tire happened to pick this month to go bald. Fleet and commercial accounts are the opposite. A landscaping company with twelve trucks doesn't stop needing tires because gas prices went up. A local delivery service doesn't skip maintenance because it's raining. Once you land a handful of these accounts, you've built yourself a floor under your slow weeks that retail traffic alone can never give you. We didn't understand how true that was until we actually went and got some. ## Realizing We Were Waiting Instead of Asking For years, commercial work came to us the same way retail work did - somebody's work van had a flat, they were already a customer, and they happened to bring the fleet vehicle in too. We never once picked up the phone and asked a local business for their account. Ray finally said out loud what should've been obvious: we were treating commercial accounts like a lucky accident instead of something we could go build on purpose. So he made a list. Every landscaping company, HVAC outfit, courier service, and small delivery operation within a fifteen-minute radius of the shop. Eleven businesses. Not a mailer, not an ad - a list of people to physically walk up to. He didn't call them in random order, either. Ray ranked the list by two things: how many vehicles a business likely ran, and how close they were to the shop, since a fleet across town is a much harder sell than one that passes our sign twice a day. The landscaping company that ended up saying yes was near the top of that list for exactly those reasons — eleven trucks, and a yard less than a mile away. ## The Pitch That Actually Worked The first two calls Ray made went nowhere, and it's worth admitting that instead of skipping past it. He led with price, comparing our commercial rates to whatever the business was currently paying, and both owners politely said they'd think about it. Thinking about it means no. The third call, to that landscaping company, he changed his approach entirely. Instead of leading with price, he led with downtime. Ray: "I'm not calling to tell you we're cheaper than whoever you're using now. I want to ask you something else - when one of your trucks gets a flat mid-route, what happens to your schedule that day?" Owner: "It's a mess, honestly. We usually just limp it somewhere and eat the delay." Ray: "That's exactly the problem I want to solve for you. If you set us up as your shop, we'll keep your tire sizes in stock specifically for your fleet, we'll get any truck in and out same-day, and if it's ever urgent, we'll work around your schedule instead of making you work around ours. You're not choosing us because we're a few dollars cheaper. You're choosing us because a flat truck stops costing you a full day." That conversation is what got the account, and it's the version of the pitch we've used successfully with two more businesses since. Commercial customers don't get excited about a ten-dollar discount per tire. They get excited about not losing a truck, and therefore revenue, for an entire afternoon. ## What the Account Actually Looks Like Day to Day Landing the account was only step one. We had to actually behave differently for it to stick. Danny keeps a running list of that fleet's most common tire sizes and holds a minimum stock on hand at all times, so we're never telling them to come back tomorrow. We also gave them a direct line to Danny's cell for anything urgent, instead of routing them through the same call queue as retail customers. We put the terms in writing too, even though it started as a handshake deal - a simple one-page agreement covering pricing, expected turnaround times, and how invoicing would work each month. It took the account from feeling like a favor to feeling like a real business relationship, and it made the office side of things far less messy once the invoices started stacking up. Three months in, that one account alone was sending us four to six vehicles a week - steady, predictable, and almost entirely on weekday mornings, which happened to be another soft spot in our schedule we hadn't even targeted on purpose. ## What to Avoid Don't pitch commercial accounts on price alone. It's the easiest thing to lead with and the easiest thing to lose with, because there's always another shop willing to go a dollar lower. Lead with what actually costs a business money — downtime, scheduling chaos, unreliable turnaround - and price becomes a secondary conversation instead of the whole pitch. Don't promise same-day service you can't consistently deliver. The entire value of a fleet account is reliability. One bad experience where a truck sits for two days undoes months of trust, and commercial customers talk to each other in ways retail customers rarely do. Don't skip putting terms in writing, even for a small account. It feels unnecessary at first, especially with a business you already know. But a short written agreement on pricing and turnaround protects both sides once volume picks up and saves you from awkward conversations later about what was actually promised. And don't stop at one account and assume the work is done. Ray's list still has eight businesses on it we haven't called yet. Landing three accounts didn't feel like enough reason to stop; it felt like proof the approach works and we'd been underusing it for years. ## The Bottom Line Three phone calls turned into three commercial accounts, and those three accounts now anchor a chunk of our weekday mornings that used to be unpredictable. Retail traffic will always have its ups and downs. Fleet and commercial work doesn't care about the weather or the economy nearly as much - it just needs a shop it can count on. We spent years waiting for that kind of business to walk in on its own. It turns out it was sitting in a list of eleven phone numbers the whole time. This is Part 2 of our Fill the Bays series. Next up: The Win-Back Campaign - how we used our own customer history to bring back people who hadn't been in for a year or more, and turned old records into some of the cheapest traffic we've ever generated.